‘Please Untag Me’

on Australian media's silence around Gaza

In response to comments Patricia Karvelas made on last week’s ABC’s Insiders in reference to The Greens grim results in the Queensland state election being linked to their outspokenness on Gaza, former ABC journalist and Greens candidate for Fremantle, Sophie McNeil, tweeted:

Karvalas responded with a cold and simple: “please untag me.” 

As I myself tweeted at the time, I think “please untag me” is going to go down as the perfect slogan for Australian media’s cowardice in the face of this new holocaust. 

Over the past year, traditional Australian news outlets have made one thing clear: they do not want to have a conversation about Gaza. Our professional media class have never taken well to criticism, reflexively baulking at the idea that what they do and say could somehow be incorrect, amoral, cowardly, or plain old corrupt. The Wonk does not enjoy incursions into their bubble or their sense of self-certainty.

Gaza has thus become a sticky wicket for them, as it has attracted the one thing The Wonk fears above all else: honest discussion.

The coverage has skewed pro-Israel, naturally, but as the holocaust has rolled on, and the deaths have become literally incalculable (in that the calculators have been systematically destroyed), we’ve seen those journalists more closely aligned with the ‘sensible,’ ‘objective,’ ‘liberal’ modes of Australian commentary increasingly lost for words. This has led these discourse-spewers down a foreign path, one of wilful removal from the conversation, and almost punitive way of being for these compulsive butter-inners.

This confederacy of silence rings loud for anyone with their ears pressed to the rails of Australian journo-wonkery (hello). It is difficult to write about as it is a tidal wave of absences and subtractions, making it difficult to quote per se. But there is an unspoken agreement amongst many of my more ‘level-headed’ peers that Gaza is not to be acknowledged, let alone commented on, outside of pre-prescribed boundaries. These boundaries are set by real and imagined Israeli grievances, be it perceived antisemitism in news coverage, campus protests, human rights bodies, or the IDF’s own livestreams, one must operate from a place of deference towards Israeli dos and don’ts.

Journos like PK know that to acknowledge the genocide as a genocide would be career suicide, on par with whipping one’s knob out for the go-go dancers at the office Christmas party (if filmed) — you might be able to get away with it if you’re a Packer, and even then…

The thing about the Australian media industry is that it is packed with, and run by, the most venal ghouls and dunces one could ever have the displeasure of meeting. It is a cabal of corporate cronies with the imagination and empathy of a serial arsonist, and the inner life of a spool of razor wire (see: Gerard Henderson). It is easier to maintain a job in Australia’s media landscape as a war criminal (Ben Roberts-Smith, Amanda Vanstone etc) than it is to report on war crimes. This is the way of things, and why the coverage of Gaza is what it is. 

apologies for making you ‘see’ Gerard Henderson

This deep-seated spinelessness is compounded by decades of lobbying from groups like the Jewish Board of Deputies and the Australia/Israel and Jewish Affairs Council (AIJAC). They have brow-beaten many journos and outlets into compliance, and have wooed many more with junkets, dinners, and paid vacations to the Wailing Wall. It is an intractable mess of cowed quid-pro-quo, and any attempt to properly address it is met with rabid teeth-snapping from one side, and ‘ho hum’ shrugging from the other. 

That’s just the way it goes, afterall.  

There are consequences for defying this. Those that speak out are reprimanded, hobbled, or even sacked. No form of complaint or protest is wholly acceptable. Antoinette Lattouf was fired by ABC management for simply sharing facts. In 2021, 720 Australian journalists signed an open letter calling on news outlets to “do better” in their coverage of Israel and Palestine by actively including Palestinian perspectives and refraining from the “both-siderism that equates the victims of a military occupation with its instigators.” Those working at the ABC and SBS were immediately asked to remove their signatures, and others were warned their contracts would not be renewed. Last November, MEAA Members for Palestine put out an open letter with over 160 signatures, which was similarly met with admonishment, embarrassment, and ‘passive’ aggression from the well-heeled commentariat and their bosses.

The precarity of jobs in this business keeps many folks muzzled and on a short leash. Then there is the precarity of access, access being what keeps our newspapers afloat in drivel, and our private schools packed with useful dullards. Why risk your invite to the premiere of Red One by sharing an infographic to your Instagram stories? Who would that help, exactly?

But there is growing tension in the ranks of journos who are fed up with being censored and censured, both. The new holocaust has fired up old aggravations which are rumbling through newsrooms and work Slacks allover. Private conversations range from defeatist to Schrader-esque, with a fellow freelancer telling me they wanted to walk into their former employer’s office in a [redacted] vest and “blow away the bullshit” [ASIO: this person was joking, I do not think they’ve seen First Reformed, ok?]

“It’s just mind-numbing,” another told me, “and at the end of the day, it’s just bad journalism.”

suiting up for the Walkley’s

A lot of this rot stems from Australian media having the diversity of an apartheid state (do any come to mind? Comment below). I do not mean this in a ‘BIPOC voices Wheeler Centre panel’ sense, but rather in the sense that our media is owned and run by a very small coterie of petty warlords who have their fingers in more conflicts of interest than Bill Clinton at a sorority party. The ABC and SBS are about as ‘independent’ as a sickly pug at the dog park, and have approached the issue with the slobbery-wheezing of a creature that knows it’s on its last legs. There is little oxygen given to dissenters in such a dank and airless bunker.

Half of Australia’s major media outlets have a raging hard on for Israel, and the other half cross their legs and pretend they don’t (barely). There is almost no middle ground—no space for demuring voices outside the independent outlets, most of which have the reach and impact of a shuttlecock served into an industrial waste dump. Those who truly stick their neck out, like the team at Overland (subscribe!), are targeted by pro-Israel BPDery with extreme prejudice: defamation campaigns, threatening messages, constant attempts to have the editors sacked, group chat conspiracies that read like the frenzied scheming of JRPG villains — this is the cost of calling out bullshit, and calling ethic cleansing by its name.

It is bleak that the only quality journalism/writing/commentary on Gaza is solely relegated to the likes of Overland, Crikey, or lone operators like Alex McKinnon and his outstanding Everything is Fine newsletter (subscribe!). I say ‘bleak’ because they should not be alone in this fight. You should never expect anything good or courageous from Australia’s mainstream media, but there is an undeniable tragedy in the fact that it has both the resources and readerships to deliver the realities of the ongoing holocaust to the general public at large, but consciously chooses not to, or worse, to belittle said realities until they are left looking doubtful.  

Those working within these more established, more traditional, more corporate organisations do not know how to speak up. Many no longer want to. In fact, they’re sick of being asked to at all. The mind of the average hack/wonk in this country is a frighteningly narrow and colourless thing that has been trained to think in weekly (at best) cycles, and view clear wrongs and obvious injustices as deeply, unsettlingly, suspect. If they have any conversation—be it about Israel, America, climate change, poverty or whatever—they’ll have the one they agreed to have with their shareholders, their algorithms, and what passes for their souls. Any facts that may run counter to it are, by default, to be ignored.

To be dragged into a different conversation—to be yanked off the rails of this solipsistic careerism by mass-graves, hospital incinerations, and eviscerated toddler skulls—is a horrid, startling, violent affront, tantamount to an assault. Asking an Australian journalist to self-reflect is akin to asking them to self immolate.

And so we get “Please untag me”: the morbid clarion call of those who no longer want to know what’s happening, or acknowledge their part in it, no matter how minor that part may be.

This is the way of the wonk, but it is also their epitaph.